Dutch
frequency dictionary
The Dutch frequency dictionary ranks the 10,042 most common Dutch words and phrases, measured across 14,762,848 tokens of subtitle dialogue from the OpenSubtitles corpus. Learning the top 68 Dutch entries covers half of everything said, and the top 1,124 covers 80%. The single most common Dutch word is “ik” (I), which accounts for 3.8% of running text on its own. Every entry carries its rank, raw count, Zipf score, and an English translation.
Corpus
These 10,042 entries account for 90.6% of all running Dutch text in the corpus.
68 of them cover half of it.
Dutch at a glance
The short answers, straight from the corpus.
- Words for half of speech
- 68
- Words for 80%
- 1,124
- Most common word
- ik
- Corpus size
- 14,762,848 tokens
Entries needed to cover 50% of everything said in Dutch
Entries needed to cover 80% of running Dutch text
“I” — said 555,654 times in the Dutch corpus
179,647 distinct Dutch word forms were counted
Mixed rounds
Dutch · All three modes, shuffled
Loading Dutch…
The ten most common Dutch entries
Together they cover 23.1% of everything said in the corpus.
- 1 ik I 555.7K×
- 2 je you 532.7K×
- 3 het it 389.7K×
- 4 de the 378.7K×
- 5 is is 327.9K×
- 6 dat that 313.6K×
- 7 een a / one 272K×
- 8 niet not 262.4K×
- 9 en and 206.1K×
- 10 wat what 164K×
How far each slice of the list gets you
Share of running Dutch text covered by everything up to that rank.
The six bands, in Dutch
The same bands the game asks you to guess.
| Band | Entries | Phrases | Median Zipf | Text covered |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top 100 | 100 | 5 | 6.50 | 55.5% |
| 101–500 | 400 | 44 | 5.53 | 18.1% |
| 501–1,000 | 500 | 64 | 5.01 | 5.6% |
| 1,001–2,000 | 1,000 | 123 | 4.63 | 4.5% |
| 2,001–4,000 | 2,000 | 279 | 4.25 | 3.8% |
| 4,001–8,000 | 4,000 | 565 | 3.87 | 3.1% |
Word shape
Character lengths across the Dutch top 1,000 — average 5.3.
Characters per word
Phrases that behave like words
1,398 multi-word units earned a rank of their own.
- #41 ik heb I have
- #50 ik ben I am
- #79 heb je Do you have?
- #89 ik wil I want
- #91 ik weet I know
- #101 je bent You are
- #108 je hebt You have
- #110 ben je are you
What stands out in Dutch
Read straight off this language's own numbers.
- Just 68 entries cover half of everything said in the Dutch subtitle corpus.
- The ten most common Dutch entries alone account for 23.1% of running text.
- 1,398 of the top 10,042 entries are multi-word phrases that behave like single units — the most common is “ik heb”.
- The longest single word inside the Dutch top 1,000 is “waarschijnlijk” (14 characters, rank 572).
- Most of the Dutch top 1,000 is short: 5-character words are the single largest group, and the average is 5.3 characters.
- Frequency falls away fast: the whole 4,001–8,000 band together covers only 3.1% of the corpus.
How this Dutch ranking was calculated
Built once, offline, and shipped as static data.
The source is the Dutch side of OpenSubtitles v2024 via OPUS — 14,762,848 tokens of transcribed speech, which is closer to how people talk than a newspaper or Wikipedia corpus would be.
Words are counted using Dutch's own rules rather than by splitting on spaces, so the counts hold up for writing systems that do not put spaces between words. Timings, formatting and speaker names are stripped out first. 179,647 distinct words appear in all; the 10,042 most common are kept.
Repeated word sequences that hold together are promoted into the same ranking as single words, which is why 1,398 entries here are phrases. Each entry carries a raw count, a per-million rate, a Zipf score, and the cumulative share of running text it and everything above it cover.
English glosses come from a translation cascade with per-entry provenance, and anything the translators only echoed back is marked unresolved rather than presented as a translation. 420 of the 10,042 Dutch entries are still unresolved and are never used as game questions.
Common questions about Dutch word frequency
Answered from this language's own corpus.
How many Dutch words do you need to know?
Around 68 Dutch words and phrases cover half of everything said in ordinary speech, and about 1,124 cover 80%. Coverage climbs steeply at first and then flattens: the whole top 10,042 reaches 90.6%, so the last few thousand entries add far less than the first few hundred.
What are the most common Dutch words?
The ten most common Dutch entries are ik (I), je (you), het (it), de (the), is (is), dat (that), een (a / one), niet (not), en (and) and wat (what). Together they account for 23.1% of all running Dutch text in the corpus.
What is the most common word in Dutch?
The most common Dutch word is “ik”, meaning “I”. It appears 555,654 times across the corpus, which is 3.8% of everything said.
How is this Dutch frequency list calculated?
The list is built from the Dutch side of the OpenSubtitles corpus — 14,762,848 tokens of transcribed dialogue, which reflects spoken language far more closely than a news or encyclopedia corpus. Text is tokenised with Unicode word boundaries, subtitle timing and formatting are stripped, and the 179,647 distinct forms found are ranked by raw count. The top 10,042 are kept, each with a per-million rate, a Zipf score, and its cumulative share of running text.
Does the Dutch list include phrases as well as words?
Yes. 1,398 of the 10,042 Dutch entries are multi-word phrases that repeat tightly enough to behave like single vocabulary items — the most common is “ik heb” (I have), at rank 41. They are ranked alongside single words rather than in a separate list, because knowing them as units is what fluency looks like.
How much Dutch do the top 100 words cover?
The 100 most common Dutch entries cover 55.5% of running text by themselves. That is why they are worth learning first: no other 100 items in the language come close.
Is the Dutch frequency dictionary free to download?
Yes. All 9,622 translated Dutch entries can be exported as JSON, CSV, TSV, Markdown, or an Anki deck straight from the dictionary page, with no account and no sign-up. The data is prebuilt and served as static files.
Corpora of a similar size
Languages whose subtitle corpus is closest to Dutch's.